Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 36

choices. Consequently, Adorno and Horkheimer do not investigate what
motivates the individual internally to choose entertainment over art, to
value ease over meaningful contemplation. I argue—in short—that those
decisions are informed by taste. Taste is heavily theorized as a socially
conditioned phenomenon—most famously by Pierre Bourdieu—but it also
resides within us and informs the choices we make. Surely, if there was not
already a market for kitsch, comprising individuals with prefigured tastes,
companies would cease producing this “sugary trash”.
Taste orients focus to the individual. Some individuals take pleasure in
highbrow over middlebrow because some have more refined taste than
others, which speaks to the vertical ordering high culture needs to locate
and disinterestedly celebrate accomplishment and intellect. Likewise, Roger
Kimball (����:�) reminds his readers that high culture is a “moral endeavor
in which the notion of hierarchy, of a rank-ordering of accomplishment, is
integral”. If hierarchy sounds anathema, it exposes the reflex in democracies
to view cultural practices through an egalitarian lens—the idea that there’s
no high or low, just difference. Scruton offers a compelling counter response.
He writes (����:���), “In a democratic culture people are inclined to believe
that it is presumptuous to claim to have better taste than your neighbor. By
doing so you are implicitly denying his right to be the thing that he is.” In
other words, the refusal to acknowledge different levels of taste equates to
the refusal to acknowledge the experiences, upbringings and interests that
make us all individuals.
But unlike middlebrow culture, which packages ersatz artistic experiences,
low culture does not pretend to be what it is not. Reality shows, pop music,
street performances, and YouTube videos are examples of low culture. They
do not try to package affective responses as alternatives to high art. The
critic Joseph Epstein uses this distinction to explain how low culture, as
popular culture, is not equivalent to middlebrow culture. He (����) writes:
“Of course not all popular culture is drivel or crap. Lots of it gives pleasure
without bringing corruption in its wake. Much of it informs us, in ways that
high culture does not, about the way we live now…”. Works associated with
popular culture do have the capacity to explain the daily lived experience.
I noticed that function during my master’s program when I completed an
extensive project on public art in an Upstate New York community. Mural
painters, sculptors, and other artists went before a local arts commission to
submit proposals for their works, which were used by the local government
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